Month: April 2013

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The Place Beyond the Pines

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Directed by Derek Cianfrance

Starring: Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes

Grade: A

The Place Beyond the pines is really three movies in one. Three different stories, though related, are told, but not interweaving. The first third is a bit of a modern crime noir, second third is a police corruption tale, and the last third is the story of two wounded sons doing battle for their fathers’ sins. That it succeeds in all three modes is pretty remarkable. It teases us with its ambitions for a while, starting out as a minimalistic, character driven story and ending on an epic scale spanning two generations. Director Derek Cianfrance, who last gave us Blue Valentine (also starring Ryan Gosling), a toned down horribly depressing drama about a doomed marriage, sets his sights much higher this time.

The movie starts out with mumbling, stoic tough guy and circus daredevil, Luke (Gosling) discovering he has a one year old son. He makes the decision to do the right thing and stick around for the kid, even though he’s not really wanted. His baby momma Romina (Eva Mendes) still has feelings for him but her new man is not happy with Luke’s intrusion into their lives. Luke takes up robbing banks in order to support his son. Gosling knows this world well, he knows in this case it’s a lot more important what he doesn’t say rather than the dialogue that is used. Quietly mumbling his way through scenes helps shape this character and the bleakness of the world. Sometimes the script forgets that and gives moments of too much clarity, like when his bank-robbing friend tell him “If you ride like lightning you’re going to crash like thunder.” This comes from a character that smokes and drinks his way through life when he’s not driving the getaway truck. It’s not a terrible thing, and maybe it’s needed, but it feels a little forced. Soon, though, that obviously foreshadowing quote comes to fruition. A bank job goes wrong and has tragic consequences for Luke.

The second story is about hero cop Avery (Bradley Cooper), struggling with both a physical injury and severe damage to his psyche. He’s not quite so sure he’s the hero everybody thinks he is. His new role gets him into the inner circle and he quickly finds out about the corruption within his station. The crooked cops, led by Deluca (Ray Liotta at his Ray Liottaest) attempt to turn him to their cause, but Avery is too moral of a guy to be seduced. Or at least, that’s what we think initially. Avery, with the help of his Judge and politically powerful father, uses the situation and his new found knowledge to gain his own political influence and launch a career. Cooper plays this well, as someone who is a good man but too politically minded to ever truly be a morally centered person. Cooper’s recently gotten a lot of accolades for his acting and has come a long way from being the go-to asshole in an R-rated comedy. His work here is some of the more subtle I’ve seen from him.

The last section of the film jumps forward in time and tells the story of the two men’s sons unwillingly, and in one case unknowingly, dealing with the consequences of their father’s choices. The two teenagers, AJ and Jason, both seniors in high school, are drifting towards dark paths, though in different ways. One is withdrawn and isolated while the other is angry and sadistic. They fight, manipulate, and seek only to hurt each other, for reasons that are much clearer to us than them.

The three sections build towards a confrontation which ends in a confession, an apology, and if not exactly anything even remotely happy, there is at least an acceptance. This is, after all, a pretty noir world we’re in, and by definition we can’t get a happy ending. What we do get is a detailed, fully realized world populated by people who are in a constant struggle to find meaning and hope amidst the pain of an increasingly bleak existence and the city of Synecdoche has never looked so drab and lifeless. But the film is not interested in making you abandon all hope either, it wants to leave that possibility alive that things can finally work out, probably because that will make it all the more devastating when it doesn’t. Through everything the movie attempts to do and all the genres it encompasses, it finally settles on the good old-fashioned American epic. The mantra “Go west, young man” is at the center of its resolution, both literally and figuratively. One could argue that The Place Beyond the Pines tries to do too much, to be too much, but it’s that reckless ambition that defines the great American film, isn’t it?

Go see this movie!


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A Life At the Movies

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I can’t really tell you when I first started reading Roger Ebert’s reviews, only that I’ve been reading them longer than I can remember, longer than I even knew who he was in fact. I didn’t know him as a TV personality and have no memory of watching his show until the Roeper days to be honest. To me, Ebert was simply the guy who wrote about movies every week in the paper. I loved movies, so I read his reviews even though I didn’t actually see the vast majority of the movies he was writing about. The first review I can recall having an impact on me was his review of the Jim Carrey movie The Mask. He liked it, surprising in retrospect because my adult self can’t really stand that movie, but was surprised that he liked it because he didn’t like Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. This blew my young, adolescent mind. How can somebody not like Jim Carrey? Pet Detective shaped a great deal of my preteen sense of humor. I used to say “Alrighty then” so often that I’d like to travel back in time and kick my 12 year old ass for being such an obnoxious little shit.

Still, I wasn’t mad at the disagreement. Instead, it did something else to me. I finally noticed his name at the top of the review and started paying more attention each week to his write-ups. Week after week he’d talk about movies, sometimes trashing them and sometimes praising them, but always confident in his opinion. I still mostly enjoyed reading about movies, but I also started noticing things in my own film watching that he would talk about. Over the years I’d learn to spot flat characters, plot contrivances, over-reliance on special effects. To say that Ebert taught me more about movies than anybody else is an understatement. He taught me virtually everything I know. Sure, some of that knowledge has been reinforced by friends, professors, books and other critics, but the root of everything was with Roger Ebert. I didn’t always agree with him, in fact would argue vehemently against many of his reviews, but one of the greatest things he taught me is that it doesn’t matter whether I agree with him. It’s not his job as a critic to cater to me. He said it best: “The job is to describe my reaction to a film, to account for it, and evoke it for others. The job of the reader is not to find his opinion applauded or seconded, but to evaluate another opinion against his own.” I have trouble articulating just what this statement means to me. This isn’t just the attitude I have towards movies and critics, it’s the backbone of my philosophy on life, really. And if movies can teach us something important about our lives and the greater world around us, a good critic is about as useful a tool as we can have.

The above quote is in his terrific response to the hate mail he got when he dared suggest Transformers 2 isn’t a good movie. I encourage you to read it and it will give you an idea on just what a critic is actually for and the amazing wit of Roger Ebert. Occasionally I’ve been referred to as an elitist by friends or family, and this rebuttal is just perfect.

That somebody would refer to him as an elitist has always been funny to me, because he’s never come off that way to me. He’s sort of stuck in the middle in some ways, too artsy for the mainstream crowd and too mainstream for the art crowd. He never dismissed a movie simply because it’s a summer blockbuster nor did he reward a movie for being artistic. He was honest, and often brutal, and frequently hilarious.

I’m not really a critic, I just have a blog where I write about stuff. I’ve also moved on a bit in regards to my choice of critics I read, or at least expanded. Ebert still is, or was now, a weekly read, but I’ve found others whose opinions and writings I enjoy as much as him. Though I still have yet to find one I cherish as much. All I can really say is that Roger Ebert has given me years of enjoyment and insight and I’m eternally thankful for his role in this world. I’ll miss reading him every week, but I guess it is somewhat comforting that even a nerd like me hasn’t read every review he’s ever written. Which means I’ve got years of his archives to go through. I’ll probably start tonight and I encourage you to do the same.